Reading

Ethan Frome food

Reading descriptions of food in books is maybe one of my favourite things. I often read the descriptions two or three times, imagining how the combinations work and comparing the food to what I’m already familiar with. Recently I read a food description in Ethan Frome that was among the most unusual I’ve seen: She …

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A 1971 frenemy

One of Decca’s favourite words. In a 1977 essay in the London Daily Mail (reprinted in the New York Times and later in Poison Penmanship), she wrote that “frenemy” (which she sometimes spelled “frienemy”) was “an incredibly useful word that should be in every dictionary, coined by one of my sisters when she was a small child to describe …

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Decca and letters.

Arrived back at Joan’s just in time for dinner. To it came Doris Lessing (you know who she is, a best-selling English writer of the Angry Young school) . . . and, joy of joys, 12-year-old Peter Lessing, who had learned about Benjy’s arrival and has planned his whole Easter vacation around showing Benj London! …

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PD James interview

But then one day, you know, I suddenly realized with an absolute shock that there never was going to be a convenient time, and that if I didn’t make a beginning, I would be saying to my grandchildren, ‘What I really wanted to be was a writer.’ So I had to make time. – PD …

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Mrs Beeton, and a recipe

A couple of months ago I stumbled upon my dream book in a secondhand book store. Despite the name, Mrs Beeton’s Household Management isn’t my dream book because I yearn for the upper echelons of hausfrauness or anything. I discovered an older version of the book in 2008, and since then I’ve been interested by it …

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I know the feeling.

Jonna filled the teakettle in the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, looking at her own face, she thought with sudden bitterness that it couldn’t go on like this, these short stories that were never finished and just went on and on getting rewritten and discarded and picked up again, all those words that got changed …

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